Just had a real eye-opener the last few days, but confirmed my feelings towards hot-spots.
* P25 Phase 1 in wideband 25k mode - holy cow that's nice. Even when heard on a consumer-grade scanner.
* System Fusion - VW / wideband mode. Awesome, but falls just a *hair* short of P25 Wide as long as FEC is not really that necessary for the link.
* DMR - Just as good. Of course the Motorola's can really belt out high-quality audio. Usually with mic-agc off and gain tweaked to the user. Covered for many years.
But here's my big but! (snicker)
Radio-to-radio, ie radio> repeater > radio can be just awesome.
Hot Spots - *can* be good, but due to poor-quality ISP connections, including using a cell-phone, most are a joke to communicate with. Similar to having a long rag-chew with someone with an intermittent mic cable.
Does everyone not know about prime-time congesion, especially with consumer home ISP setups? Or the fact that unless you have a *guaranteed commercial* ISP account, your UDP packets, (one-way unacked packets) are the FIRST things that get dropped during congestion?
The hot-spots I've heard, on all 3 of the formats listed above, usually are freaking AWESOME but only with a high quality ISP account.
Or we can keep talking with virtual broken mic connectors which are really dropped UDP packets (aside from massive RF issues)
Rant over. Guess I'm a digital grump about hot spots and poor ISP connections ..... back to my cave.
* P25 Phase 1 in wideband 25k mode - holy cow that's nice. Even when heard on a consumer-grade scanner.
* System Fusion - VW / wideband mode. Awesome, but falls just a *hair* short of P25 Wide as long as FEC is not really that necessary for the link.
* DMR - Just as good. Of course the Motorola's can really belt out high-quality audio. Usually with mic-agc off and gain tweaked to the user. Covered for many years.
But here's my big but! (snicker)
Radio-to-radio, ie radio> repeater > radio can be just awesome.
Hot Spots - *can* be good, but due to poor-quality ISP connections, including using a cell-phone, most are a joke to communicate with. Similar to having a long rag-chew with someone with an intermittent mic cable.
Does everyone not know about prime-time congesion, especially with consumer home ISP setups? Or the fact that unless you have a *guaranteed commercial* ISP account, your UDP packets, (one-way unacked packets) are the FIRST things that get dropped during congestion?
The hot-spots I've heard, on all 3 of the formats listed above, usually are freaking AWESOME but only with a high quality ISP account.
Or we can keep talking with virtual broken mic connectors which are really dropped UDP packets (aside from massive RF issues)
Rant over. Guess I'm a digital grump about hot spots and poor ISP connections ..... back to my cave.